Interview of Jason Robinson of Socialhome

He created the project the-federation.info that makes statistics with Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla and Socialhome and others social networks. The idea was to offer a few words about each project and provide links to their project pages, in addition to showing some numbers.

From the start the idea was to create a library that abstracts multiple protocols under a common API. Not quite there yet, but now that ActivityPub is mature, the plan is to add support for that within the early months of 2018. The library will never be a one-to-one mapping to Diaspora or ActivityPub, but rather an opinionated API for both.

With Socialhome I’ve tried to take the best features of all the platforms I’ve used and merge them together into my own dream platform. It has a (up to) 4 column grid layout like Pinterest, which supports visually rich content and reading through lots of content fast. It supports lengthy Markdown (and HTML/JS/CSS for trusted users) formatted blog post like content, but also works totally fine for micro-blogging. One of the key features that will be added will be highly customizable streams like for example Tweetdeck has for Twitter. I also want to enhance the blogging features for things like anonymous comments, allow full text searching and other neat tools not available in many existing platforms.

Thanks for joining us today, Jason! Could you take a moment to describe yourself, and what it is you do?

You started out in the space as a contributor to the Diaspora project. What kind of contributions did you make?

You run the-federation.info — could you tell us a little bit about that project and how it got started?

How did the social relay solution come about for Diaspora? What problem does it solve?

You’ve been working on a federation library in Python for almost two years now. Why Python?

What inspired you to start Socialhome? How is it different from Diaspora?

What kind of things are on your development roadmap?

What is the most challenging thing that you have worked on so far?

Do you have any advice for people in this space that might want to start their own project?

Don’t be afraid to start. Your project doesn’t have to be successful, or even something you end up using yourself. Start hacking, work on things you want and always ensure to have fun. Don’t listen to other people telling you what is good and how you should do something. Experimenting is key to learning.